


The Marks We Leave

by fluffernutter8



Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, Gen, Non-Comic Compliant, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-13
Updated: 2014-11-13
Packaged: 2018-02-25 04:38:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2608760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluffernutter8/pseuds/fluffernutter8
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.</i> A few years after the battle with the Black Thorn, Angel contemplates scars.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Marks We Leave

Faith has a kid before any of them. No one is more surprised than she is about that part, although she is less surprised that the father was just a one-night stand.

“Mom always said I would get knocked up one day,” she said bitterly when she shows up at Angel’s office the day she found out. He had calmed her down, keeping his hands up and his body away from her, nervous at the way she was brandishing the pregnancy test. He was pretty sure it didn’t have any wood, but he’d seen the damage a slayer could cause with unconventional weaponry and unstable emotions.

After the initial panic, when she’d said daily that she was making an appointment with Planned Parenthood, she had gotten into a fight with a particularly feisty vampire. As soon as it touched her abdomen, she exploded.

Panting afterward, she’d looked at Angel. “So maybe I won’t suck at this mom stuff,” she had said. “But you’ve gotta swear to be godfather.”

It was a strange reaction, a denial of the potential danger that her being the slayer could lead to, but he nodded. “I can’t actually participate in a baptism,” he said, quiet and hesitant.

“Like any church would even have me,” she joked, and the part of him that had wandered alone for a hundred years, the part that wished he could pray the rosary softened, and he said yes.

It was a girl, and they handed her to Angel in the moment after she was born. He wanted to call her something with meaning, Grace or Hope, but Faith rolled her eyes and called her Kaiya, like Angel didn’t know Japanese or that she could be sentimental.

“She’s gonna call you Uncle Angel,” Faith had said, when it was just the three of them in the room.

“Sounds ridiculous,” he muttered before turning to her. “Just Angel will be fine.”

“Like Angel was the coolest cool guy name before,” she had laughed, but it was absent as she looked down at her daughter. 

* * *

Kai is seven when Faith says she can start reading Harry Potter. Angel sits beside her in bed, his back braced against the wall, reading from the first book as she snuggles under the covers and tries to see the page.

“Scars can come in handy,” he reads. “I have one myself above my left knee that is a perfect map of the London Underground.” Kai looks up at him.

“A scar is a cut?” she asks.

“It’s when something happens to your body, and it leaves a mark for a long time,” he says. “Like how Sarah got stitches when she fell in gymnastics and you can still see where they were.” Kai nods and they move on.

He lies with Kai after they have finished the chapter and turned out the light. He wonders sometimes if seven is too old for her to still need people to lie with her so she can go to sleep, but when he had mentioned it to Faith she had shaken her head.

“She gets people to lie with her until she doesn’t want them anymore.” He had thought of all her cracks about not getting enough hugs as a kid and doesn’t question it again.

Kai’s breath evens out but Angel doesn’t leave. He is thinking about scars. Sometimes he wishes he had more. He has the ones from his human life, but part of him wants the physical signs of his time on earth, of the things that have happened to him. He knows it doesn’t make sense; he probably wouldn’t be able to go unnoticed in public if his body revealed the injuries it had sustained over the years. Still, there are some things he wishes his skin remembered. He knows the space below his throat where a cross had burned into his skin and he hadn’t moved away from the pain because Buffy was kissing him. He can remember the piercing in his ribcage that had come from Buffy stabbing him to save the world. He can sometimes still feel the jagged burn of lightning hitting his chest as Holtz stole Connor from him. But given time his body heals all things. Even the tattoo of the Black Thorn disappeared after their defeat; the griffin only stays on his skin because he requested that it be specially enchanted to do so. These wounds are invisible to anyone but him, erased by the same power that allowed him to survive them in the first place. His skin tells no stories.

Eventually he gets up. Kai rolls over into the space where he had been sitting, pulling the pillow to her small body with a sigh. Angel glances at her once more in the dim light of the hall and goes downstairs.

Buffy is sitting on the kitchen counter, her heels tapping against the cabinets below as she eats ice cream directly from the container. She usually doesn't do either of those things when Kai is staying at their house, but she looks a little distant. Her eyes focus on Angel as he enters the room, and she smiles.

She hadn't been able to smile like that when she had first come to live with them. Faith had kept in touch with Dawn and, sporadically, with Giles. They had mentioned what Buffy was doing: crossing the world to find new slayers, setting up their headquarters in Scotland, figuring out a training program. All the things involved in being the replacement for the Watcher's Council. Giles had sounded almost relieved when Angel had asked for her number, which he didn't understand until he had finally gotten ahold of her over the phone.

"Faith's pregnant? Shocker." But even that didn't have any energy. "And what, it's a prophecy thing? Demon target? Wonder kid powers activate?" There was an exhaustion in her voice that he knew too well, a drained feeling from a two-decade lifetime when she was expected to give and give and give, repeated and relentless.

He could have told her that he needed help monitoring the Cleveland hellmouth with Faith out of commission. He could have told her that he still thought of pregnancy as a time for women, a protective circling of mothers and aunts and sisters that Faith didn't have. "It's just a baby. All babies need help."

So she had come, and it had been eight months of the slow relaxation of lungs, of gradually longer talks, of the unfolding revelation of hearts.

Buffy had been the sixth person to hold Kaiya, although she insists that she was third (“Doctors and nurses don’t count! And the nurses looked the same anyway; you can’t even count them as two people”). Angel hadn’t been certain that she would stay until that moment, but he had seen the love and protectiveness that had come over her in that moment and he had known.

“Hi,” he says to her now, coming to stand beside her. When he leans against the counter, they are around the same height.

“Hi,” she says. She lifts her chin toward the ceiling, toward the room they keep for Kaiya. “What took so long up there? She trick you into reading another chapter?”

He opens his mouth to tell her what he was thinking, but pauses at the look on her face, the patient, knowing eyes. He knows that she would understand if he told her what he had been thinking, that she would understand a body that would never show penance or the physical marks of his joy. But that is exactly the point: she understands, she knows his stories and his scars so that there is no need for them to stripe his flesh. She carries his scars and she heals them as well. 

He had thought that if he survived the Black Thorn then Shanshu would be on the other side, but it wasn’t. Willow and Giles keep telling him “soon, soon” but he doesn’t know what that means, and mostly it just worries him to think what could be coming with it. But if he dies before it comes, if all that is left of him is dust, he will still be there in Buffy’s mind, he will live on in Connor and Kai and Faith. His skin does not need to tell his story.

“I was thinking about scars,” he tells Buffy. “And memory.”

He almost expects her to make a quip, but she just tilts her head. “Okay.” She hops off the counter, spoon stuck in her mouth, to put the ice cream away. Angel takes the spoon out as she walks past and goes to the sink.

“Faith’s picking her up in the morning?” he asks, voice nighttime soft despite the running water.

“Yeah.” Buffy rests herself against his side as he shuts off the sink. He tucks an arm around her and they stand side by side in the middle of their kitchen. “I don’t know why she thinks parent-teacher conferences are going to take that long. We all know they’re going to say she’s smart and polite and a joy to have in class.”

“Do teachers say that? Mine never did.”

“Mine either, but that’s the world according to Willow.”

“I think Faith’s just proud,” Angel says. “And worried that she’s not doing things right.” He knows that Buffy doesn’t entirely understand his affection for Faith, but he doesn’t understand how she can get drinks and sit around mocking movies when Spike comes to town, so he supposes it’s all equal.

“Do you think that we’re doing things right?” Buffy asks.

Kai is her own person. She is not a cross burned layers deep into his skin, she is not a sword in his flesh. But she is in some ways a scar too. Not a mark of hurt, but one showing where he has been and what he has done.

Kai is Faith’s and she is Angel’s and she is Buffy’s too. Their beautiful girl, their feisty, protected girl, who they can point to and say, “This is what I did on earth and it is good.”

“Yeah,” he says, looking down at Buffy’s face. “I think we’re doing things absolutely right.”

**Author's Note:**

> Title quote from John Green, summary from Rumi. Harry Potter quote from Sorcerer's Stone. Thanks for angelus2hot for taking up this mission.


End file.
